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Manbench Industries; Purveyors of general mayhem since 1994, a blog to follow the crazed, possibly deranged projects and emotive musings, of an undergraduate engineer, and an apprentice organ builder who have always felt they were born in the wrong age. Follow us as we, re-write history, learn lost skills, discover strange new worlds, break things, rant at things, mend things, make new things and generally find ways of passing the day instead of doing "proper work" !

Tuesday, 5 November 2013

Faraday Motor - can you help?

Am looking for a bit of advice on this one - has anyone built a Faraday motor? I knocked this one up a while ago now just to try the principle but it never really worked properly. Basically, DC current is fed to the hook at the top of the stick which then feeds down through the dangling rod into the dish, which is full of a conductive liquid (Mercury in the original - but I'm using salt water). The circuit is completed by another wire leading out of the conductive liquid to the other side of the power source. A magnet is placed in the center of the dish and the dangling rod is supposed to spin around it.

However...my attempts to get it working resulted in the rod spiralling to the center and then just fizzing a bit. Has anyone built one of these and got it working successfully - without using Mercury? 


The Engineer.

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